the day he first saw them, as they would continue flying on their tasks which came up day after day like some redundant growth of weeds in a field that no faithful application of the hoe can overcome, until somebody came along and married them, and carried them away to flit back and forth across other kitchen doors.
There would be no getting away from that flying in all haste to serve the hunger of mankind for Annie and Mary. They were mother birds serving a brood that imposed on them in loutish exaction, too simple ever to discover the fraud that fate and men had connived against them before they were born into their cabbage-and-beef saturated world.
Dr. Hall sat in the front door of his office, as Little Jack Ryan had sat the night before smoking his festival cigar, watching Annie and Mary as they came and went, thinking these thoughts of them, holding it a pity that the future had so little in store for them, unless by some extraordinary deflection from the charted course, when they deserved so much more for their years of ministration to the overgrown, greedy brood of men. So he sat, back against the jamb, probably more comfortable for the knowledge, not even subconsciously admitted, that fate had plotted a more agreeable voyage for him than for Annie and Mary, rushing like ants about their work.
And the most agreeable thought, the most pleasant reflection of that bright Sunday morning, was that he was not obliged to remain in that country west of Dodge. He was free to pick up and leave it on a few days' notice to the company. He was not bound there by any far-projected hope; his happiness was not centered in a quarter-section of that mangy land.
